Nicky & Alicky

NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA by Robert K. Massie. 584 pages. Afheneum. $10.

When Alexander Kerensky proposed a measure to abolish the death penalty in Russia, Czar Nicholas II was opposed to the notion. What would become of discipline in the army, he wanted to know? Kerensky, who was a bit of a fusspot but a far more decent man than any of the Bolsheviks who replaced him, tried gently to explain to the last of the Romanovs that the law he proposed was designed to preserve the Czar's own life.

Nicky was unimpressed. He was as prepared as any other Russian to lay down his life for his country. He did; but that his death improved the morale of the troops has yet to be shown.

This anecdote, with its human pathos and maddening Slavic logic (psychologic would be a better term), is one that epitomizes the virtues of Robert K. Massie's book on the tragic couple who presided as semidivine personages over the geographical-mystical entity known as the Russian Empire.

Hard Luck. Massie, a Rhodes scholar and freelance journalist, will probably distress academic historians by his abstention from heavy ideological expositions--and by his brisk prose. His plain thesis is that the murder of Nicholas and Alexandra put the seal of irrevocability on the Bolsheviks' successful putsch against the infant Kerensky government. Both events are traced more to Nicholas' hard luck than to any concatenation of inevitable historical forces--a Marxist theory that 50 years of propaganda have almost conned the West into accepting.

As seen by Massie, the Romanovs' 300 years' rule was doomed by the Czarevich's hemophilia: it put the imperial pair in the oily hands of Rasputin, whose prayers they believed would heal their more than fragile son Alexis. Rasputin not only destroyed the morale of the aristocracy, he also made it impossible for Nicholas to heed sensible advice until it was too late. And he fatally fractured the image of the Czar in the mind of the masses. The imperial pair saw a calumniated saint in Rasputin; the people, in the words of a monarchist member of the Duma, saw "the beastly, drunken unclean face of a bald satyr from Tobolsk."

The Innocents. The old sinister horror movie of Rasputin has had many reruns. What is new about the Massie version is the credible manner in which he puts the obscene Rasputin goings-on into the context of the Romanov court --at once bizarre and simple, familiar and ceremonious--fatally rooted in the half-barbaric system of old Muscovy.

Despite their nurture in the sophisticated international society of European royalty, Nicky and Alicky were innocents. They remained innocents to the end. Nicky could have been taken for the twin of his cousin George, Duke of York, who, as heir to the crown of Great Britain, had better luck; he was never worshiped and he died in bed. The young Nicky was fond of uniforms and noisy parades, generous with sapphire bracelets for a ballerina in St. Petersburg. There was nothing to warn him of the gruesome shape of things to come but a swipe on the scalp by a sword-swinging Japanese madman at the end of a leisurely grand tour. Alicky was Princess Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt, favorite granddaughter of Queen Victoria--the matchmaking old matriarch of half the reigning families of Europe.

The match she made in 1894 between Nicky and Alicky would have been a happy one, had they not received the vast, ramshackle Russian Empire as a wedding present. His father, Czar Alexander, died at 49, and carefree Nicky, who had expected that papa had another 20 years of healthy despotism ahead, had to fill his big boots. Mourning marred the sumptuous Orthodox wedding, and worse was to come. At war with Japan in 1905, Nicky sent the Russian Baltic battle fleet lum bering round the world, but it was sunk in 45 minutes at Tsushima. What Nicky called the "monkeys" (he had never forgiven that slice on the scalp) had defeated mighty Russia.

Toy World. Nicky was the Czar, but the official classes and the police governed. At the center of the administrative web, Nicky and Alicky lived in a cocoon of preposterous protocol unchanged in a single item since Catherine the Great. Of pogroms and general misery, Nicky knew only what he was told. Of the good features of Russian life--the upsurge of national genius in fiction, poetry and science--he knew little, and what little he did know he did not like. His sole success was in contriving some sort of private life for himself and Alicky. At Czarskoe Selo (the Czar's village), the Romanovs had contrived a sort of toy world, protected from the real one by a high iron fence and 5,000 guardsmen. Here Nicky and Alicky lived their simple domestic idyll.

One unpleasant feature was the omnipresent police spies among the innumerable servants--a part of the monarchical system that the Bolsheviks have enthusiastically retained. And there was Rasputin. The people might not have grudged the Czar his splendor, but Rasputin was too much. Through his infatuation with the dirty monk, Nicky was finally severed from the people who he believed worshiped him.

Only a Tolstoy could do justice to the domestic story of Nicky and Alicky --its innocence, affections and jumble of family emotions. Only a Dostoevsky could do justice to the story of the Romanovs and Rasputin. Author Massie's history covers two terrible decades in European history and recreates the doomed Romanovs with admirable clar ity. The icons have gone, but a sad faded photograph remains.

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